


west broadway house, corner lot

by formerly_known_as___REDACTED



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Everyone Stays in Derry, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bluebeard Vibes, Bored Housewife, Domestic Violence, F/M, Infidelity, My First Work in This Fandom, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Second Person, Patrick Hockstetter is His Own Warning, Present Tense, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 14:29:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30124242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/formerly_known_as___REDACTED/pseuds/formerly_known_as___REDACTED
Summary: Your husband, who grew up poor in Derry and is now a respected cardio-thoracic surgeon, decides that he wants to leave Boston and move back to his childhood home.He buys a West Broadway Victorian house---easily the most beautiful home in the neighborhood, situated on an enviable slice of property---but it has fallen into disrepair, so he hires Hockstetter & Son to restore the interior and exterior paint jobs.This is a huge mistake.
Relationships: Patrick Hockstetter/Reader
Comments: 11
Kudos: 9





	west broadway house, corner lot

**Author's Note:**

> a note on tags---i'm tagging ahead as i go, so readers know what to expect; things in the tags may or may not show up in individual chapters as i post them. i am, however, intending to post individual chapter warnings; things are gonna get both graphic and terrible.

_A house is a body_ \---you think it a lot, these days.

Centuries of Christian cultural hegemony take you by the hand, walk you through the metaphor: here is your skin, making a canvas for sensation nourished by blood and light. Your bones are load-bearing walls that never see the light of day. A skull is a lockbox between the world and all of your secrets. Ribs were made by the jealous sky father to cage in your feral bird of a heart. Hands and feet pull everything from one place to the other and speaking of travel, a throat is a corridor: doors stack all the way down, lead breath and meat to feelings, memories, stray impulses, the generative cycle.

_Spend enough time living in any house and you become its map: of where things are, of what things were, of what could be, of what_ should _be_.

Is that any different than existing as a network of veins, a frame of nerves, a pulse?

_Bring this house back to life!_ said the realtor. _Revive it!_ She could’ve extended the same invitation to a defibrillator or to a revenant.

This house is a body and today it’s feverish, sun-struck. There’s too much light so you shade the windows. The wood is soft underfoot, but it groans.

* * *

In your hand, a big glass of wine.

The first time he spoke to you---the guy your husband hired to paint the house---it was over a lit cigarette.

“My husband would prefer that you not smoke in the house.”

The guy lifted one lanky hand and pinched the filter; he took it away from his mouth and his river-water eyes locked with yours and he stared until a faint heat happened in your cheeks.

“And what do _you_ prefer?”

You watched him tilt his head, run that cool gaze down the length of your body and you hurried to hide your cornered breath---it was like a secret blade running itself all around the underside of your skin, quick and cold, easing your consciousness away from your flesh until you just...drifted.

That cool gaze climbed back into yours. He licked his lips. He wanted to smile, but blinked slow as a cat.

“I…” Your legs shook. “Uh…” Your heart pounded. “Guess I don’t care?”

His mouth curved into a one-sided smile and he placed the cigarette between his lips. He snorted, turned around.

Your mouth went dry and your brain went soft at the sight of those naked shoulder blades flexing the bristles of a brush all the way up to the top of the wall.

“Don’t worry,” he murmured, the cigarette’s bright ember bouncing. “I won’t leave my ashes on your floors.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Promise.”

* * *

This house is your body, and your husband has invited another man inside it.

* * *

_She needs some love for sure_ , your husband said, _but look at those beautiful bones_.

This in the spring, when the shade trees were wet and naked and the sky was dull Maine white, too-humid, cold fog still clinging to the land the next morning; wrapped up in cold blue light, the paint eroded away, it was a house like a corpse. Forgotten in the woods somewhere and left to rot, to obey the natural order of things.

And then along comes your husband with his childhood dream. He’s got his rainmaker hands, his devotion to social capital, and enough money socked away to turn back the clock.

_West Broadway house, corner lot---I mean look at her, what a body. What a face! She’s like a fashion model who’s fallen on hard times_.

It excited him: a hobby horse, something to take credit for, the chance to will a certain kind of beauty into existence.

_It’ll need work, of course, but that’s not a problem. At least I don’t think it is, we’ve got the financing. There’s time_. Then, as an afterthought--- _you don’t think it’s a problem...do you, honey?_

Look at these shade trees. There’s at least four generations of old-growth oak and maple and horse chestnut. The shade gardens need wrestling but you’re good with plants. The original wrought-iron fencing is still in place but there’s dull white paint peeling away in ragged patches---she’s got turrets like ruinous cheekbones, her long window-eyes too gaudy for all this shade---if it’s a face then it’s a face collapsed beneath a weight of time and indifference and maybe it’s better to kill a beautiful woman and let her body rot in the woods than it is to abandon her, to neglect her all the way to the grave.

The wood beneath this paint, though---it may be weathered into a dull pallor but the integrity is still there, singing the genteel praises of old-school lumber barons.

_Regardless, though. It’s a gorgeous property for a terrific price_.

* * *

You tip the glass, take a long drink. Cold pinot grigio pulses down your throat and it strikes blood, blooms into heat.

That evening, after the incident with the cigarette, once his van had pulled out of your driveway, you sat down on the porch in the remains of the heat and fanned your legs with your skirt and let your eyes linger where the van had been and called the place your husband hired to paint the house.

You asked the man who answered about the guy they sent.

‘That’s my son,” the owner said. “That’s Patrick.”

Now you’re in your open bedroom window like a cat, crouched in the shade, cradling your big glass of wine and watching him brush paint onto the outside of the house. It’s a hot summer day---feverish, sunstruck---and every sweat-soaked thought that prowls its way through your mind is a cliché.

His skin takes the sun so much better than yours. Freckles show every inch of skin that stretched too tight over bone and got loved too hard by old summers---of course he’s peeled off whatever top he wore to work, you’re not the only one in this scenario seduced by trite bullshit---he’s put all that pale on an altar, traded it for a gentle pink flush and so much sweat that even from your third-floor window you can see it pool between his shoulder blades, glisten its way down the long valley of his spine.

You could change into a skimpy something and offer him a drink with ice in it.

You could offer his feet your hair, his hair an elastic, his face a towel.

You could move to a more dangerous window and strip, pretend that you forgot to get dressed.

He’ll enter the house at the close of the afternoon. He’ll want to get out of the sun, let someone know that he’s finished, that he’s taking off for the day---where is the lazy jazz, where are the convenient lace-topped stockings, what is it the women in the old-school pornos do?

* * *

But the real draw of him has nothing to do with worn-out scripts.

You hide yourself away so you can watch, uninterrupted and unseen. Like someone else’s secret, he can forget you while his hands take up tools and make them perform surgery.

Your husband’s hands---they aren’t like this; despite that they’ve opened human skin, steered a blade around fat and fascia, nerve and muscle, tendon and bone, they lack sensitivity. They’re disdainful of delicacy. Thick-fingered and strong, half-asleep and cruising through any given procedure, your husband’s hands are the hands of a butcher. A body on a table is no different than a carcass on a slab. What his hands do while your loved one is sleeping is brutal and efficient---any artistry falls to the body, to the after, in its slow damp dream of regenerating flesh.

A tool is just a tool---dull, inert, empty, unloved---until a hand brings it to life, revives it.

In this metaphor, the tool is the body.

The hand is the soul, a system, a map.

For long weeks, those vein-wrapped fingers debride dead paint. Days open up for a chisel, warmed with a gift of blood, its leading edge muscled into gentleness---all that pallid wood, after all, demands a certain kind of reverence for one’s elders.

He’ll rub the tiniest flecks loose with the pad of a thumb. Massage along a shingle’s seam, spread his fingers out to seek what he missed by feel. He’ll lean in, read the lie of remaining traces before using the tip of a finger to roll off softened flakes of old white and sometimes you forget your own skin to become a thin wood shell that bore its last fruits for a nineteenth-century summer.

Sometimes, the room you’re in breathes when you can’t.

The sun eventually falls in, drapes itself across the floor. The wood stretches. It’s somnolent, stilled with memory and dream; it strives to accommodate that loose spill of accidental heat.

And what is meat-cutting next to this meticulous, devoted, hand-tamed resurrection?

* * *

Sometimes, after a day of watching Patrick feel up your walls, you’ll sit in the dark while your husband snores away the stillest hours of the night and imagine taking up a tool against your own skin---offer a hidden cut, a temporary stitch, the tiniest burnt sacrifice to the deity of those hands.

* * *

But a map...it’s also violence.

What price is paid to learn the placement of things, their histories? What coinage spent, minted from blood or breath, even when it’s no skin off your back? It’s a casual destruction, the disappearing of possibilities: holding undecided space open is muscular work.

What heat is generated by the excavation of this house. What gets burned, what gets used, where does the fat go. Who, here, is doing the real sweating.

But it’s not that, even as you lie to yourself, even as your husband ladles on the proverbial spoonful of sugar: this isn’t a restoration, no one here is bringing anything back whether it’s from the past or the brink.

_It’s an occupation_ , you think. _Slow or fast, with a smile or with teeth, it's the breaking of one thing to make way for another; there’s no allegiance to this house beyond what it is capable of doing---what it is a metaphor of---great bones or not_.

“I get so tired of being told that beauty is power,” you murmur to the hollows of your reflection. “Because it’s not, and it never will be.”

_Not when the owners of the beauty are owned by the rest of the culture_.

At night, when he’s done slicing through the day's tally of bodies and he’s scrubbed the heartblood out from underneath his fingernails and had a long hot shower and wants to fuck the dregs of the day out of his too-tight spine, what you remember is the taste of blood in his mouth. That growing up poor gave him bad teeth. How the minute his credit line would bear it he signed up for a full demolition---the months spent digging out the rotten roots, letting the bone heal before installing new teeth, the bruising, the taste of rust leaking into everything; that’s the cost of a full complement of sparkling American ivories.

You never said it, but in the space after the old teeth and before the new teeth, his mouth was like an axe wound.

He’d hate it, the slang for a bloody pussy applied to his noble suffering and long convalescence, but the liminality of it spoke to something deep within you---this battlefield raging between who he wanted to kill and who he wanted to be.

He still expected kisses, after all.

“You done?”

“Yeah.”

You close the medicine cabinet, watch your reflection reappear.

Behind your head a small window frames darkness, moving tree branches, a bit of moon, the orange spillover from the street light.

_Your eyes always bounce back to the way out, wondering if it’ll take the size of your hips_.

You’ve been cornered by men all your life but the truth is you’ve craved it.

“I’m done.”

“Good.”

You handle the doorframe, turn out the light, step out of the bathroom.

"I heard you talking to yourself in there." He’s smiling from the bed. “Did yourself have anything interesting to say?"

"Oh, just…the usual." You shrug. "Meditations on the nature of beauty?"

"I might have that conversation with myself if myself was as beautiful as you."

"Oh now.” You can still blush for him. “Enough of that." You laugh the lightness out of your voice. "Put the flattery away, I mean…” You flip a hand. “I'm a sure thing."

"I know." He reaches for you. "But I still like to work."

"Yeah." You sigh, climb into bed. "I know."

"You want the windows open?"

"I like them open."

You switch off your bedside lamp and the noncommittal dark washes over you and inside those currents of shadows his mouth seeks, then finds yours; his hand on your face is light and smooth, his day's growth of beard rough. He moves over you and his tongue tastes like maybe he had a beer before he brushed his clean white teeth.

_It's still a good kiss_ , you think, your lower belly simmering, _he’s still got enough gravity for it_.

He kisses your neck, lays open your breath.

Silky air blows through the trees, stirs into the curtains; it brings with it a scent of cigarette smoke.


End file.
